Friday, August 28, 2015

The Columbia Star publishes extracts from the 1890-1895 journal of Mamie Boozer Morrell, the grandmother of the author of the article, Kathy Morrell Newman:

*1891: “I am reading a book called “Jane Eyre” and words fail me when I try to tell how I enjoyed it. All I can say is that when I am not devouring it I am hungering and thirsting for it. I get scolded very often for reading so much by everyone but Papa and he never has in his life; on the contrary, he tries to cultivate my tastes more and more.”

In The Guardian, Helen Maslin publishes a top ten of literary castles and country houses:

Thornfield Hall, Jane Eyre
Thornfield is a typical gothic mansion, as remote and gloomy as its owner. But having already survived the abuse of Gateshead and the cruelty and privation of Lowood, Jane Eyre is undaunted. She takes up the position of governess to Mr Rochester’s young ward and is shown around the Hall, finding “all was well-arranged and handsome”, although she admits to some qualms about the third floor. Here, the rooms and corridors are dark and gloomy and filled with all the oldest furniture. The housekeeper, Mrs Fairfax, says “One would almost say that, if there were a ghost at Thornfield Hall, this would be its haunt.”
From the third floor, comes mad and mirthless laughter. There is an unexplained fire in the night. Later, Jane hears a scream and the sounds of a struggle and finds an injured man, oozing blood. After he has been secretly despatched in a chaise, Rochester is unable to face re-entering the house: “Come where there is some freshness, for a few moments,” he said, “that house is a mere dungeon; don’t you see it so?”
When Jane returns after a year’s absence, she finds that Thornfield has suffered the fate of so many mansions in gothic novels. It’s a blackened ruin.

As comedian Susan Calman's new sitcom about the lives of two sisters starts on Radio 4 we asked her to pick out a few of her favourite real and fictional sisters. Here goes... (...)
Like many schoolchildren of a certain age, I was forced to read the Brontë’s novels. Personally I found the repressed, corset-stretching romance rather dull. Stop staring wistfully round the moors love! He’s no good for you! Try Tinder, there are loads of blokes on there.
It must have been hard for them though. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was released within months of her sister Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Charlotte, although the most famous and successful of the family, was fascinated by the topic of sibling rivalry, and explored the 'finding of the self' in her work. Emily by contrast was reserved and painfully shy, but if Charlotte ever had plans to dominate her, she’d have thought twice after Emily, bitten by a possibly rabid dog, calmly walked into the kitchen and cauterised the wound herself with a hot iron. Would you tangle with a woman like that, even if she were your sister?
My sister and I have never written rival novels. But I did once burn myself with her straightening iron when I was pretending it was a lightsaber. So in many ways I’m as bad ass as Emily Brontë.

'No visit to the Yorkshire Moors, for example, can be undertaken without thoughts of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights; Dorset will be forever glimpsed through the prism of Thomas Hardy's fictional Wessex; the Kent marshes will always belong to Dickens.' (Jane Shilling)

Apart from The Brontë Sisters, Sneha Deepti is fond of Rabindranath Tagore’s literary works. “I draw inspiration from their writing style as well. ‘Mandaravalli’ unfolds chapters of a bold woman who follows the path of dharma and contributes to society, braving all odds. (Rani Devalla)

As I had loved reading “Pride and Prejudice” for school, I decided to venture into a similar vein with “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë. While I preferred Austen’s classic, I pitied Jane’s childhood abuse and her struggle with Mr. Rochester.

Spit It Out. (...) It begins with a foggy, atmospheric piano that sounds like it could soundtrack the opening to a Jane Eyre film adaptation, before blooming into a blistering scorcher of a tune, full of angry, barked vocals. (Lucas Fothergill)